"Not to intermeddle at all with that which God hath wrought. . ."
William Camden, Brittania

Heavy damp blue smoke loses its way among bending reed and rill, from
heaps of turved hassocks, where they've readied land for ridging to curb flood
and purify the air, he says, though come fall of leaf it will be fen again. For now,

on bare patches godwits caught in crown nets sit, silent, for market, catch a last
glimpse of rippling waves, a moorhen gliding in until her feet dig out a wake
pointing to cattle that hurry for a final watering before the drovers set them on

a southward track. A blue heron's fixed by his unblinking eye on the spot where
a fish leapt. If a wind could get on track it would still lack motive to move
anything,
even the feather that just fell, or the stalled swallow-tail. This all means waters

muzzled by the projector, not to run like froward beasts. So the Dutchman says.
Free rivers governed, water kept within banks, then, on bail, let go by careful
sluices,
caught and bridled, made to run in traces, common fens trapped, tamed by
engines,

all to be land rich as before the Flood, foison for all, says he. But from the east,
a flash from the bank we'd burst, sluice and clow freed, bursts of blue where
flocks of teal skid in, dip necks, splash like fish, so water steals from light the way

winter turns water with sheer winds slicing straight from Muscovy that overnight
bring dead hand and killing fogs, time of hoar-frost fruits, water turned to
bone, world the essence it has ever been, cast still in the heart's core.